LAS VEGAS — Next week, college football coaches can put the recruiting promises they have made to high school seniors on paper.

Then the question becomes whether they can keep them.

Uncertainty about a key element of the $2.8-billion NCAA antitrust settlement that is reshaping college sports has placed recruiters on a tightrope.

They need clarity about whether the third-party collectives that were closely affiliated with their schools and ruled name, image, likeness payments during the first four years of the NIL era can be used to exceed the $20.5-million annual cap on what each school can now pay players directly. Or, whether those collectives will simply become a cog in the new system.

Only until that issue is resolved will many coaches know if the offers they’ve made, and that can become official Aug. 1, will conform to the new rules governing college sports.

“You don’t want to put agreements on the table about things that we might have to claw back,” Ohio State coach Ryan Day explained at this week’s Big Ten media days. “Because that’s not a great look.”

No coach, of course, is going to fess up to making an offer he can’t back up.

“All we can do is be open and honest about what we do know, and be great communicators from that standpoint,” Oregon’s Dan Lanning said.

Aug. 1 is key because it marks the day football programs can start sending written offers for scholarships to high school prospects starting their senior year.

This process essentially replaces what used to be the signing of a national letter of intent. It symbolizes the changes taking hold in a new era in which players aren’t just signing for a scholarship, but for a paycheck, too.

Paying them is not a straightforward business. Among the gray areas comes from guidance issued earlier this month by the newly formed College Sports Commission in charge of enforcing rules involved with paying players, both through the $20.5-million revenue share with schools and through third-party collectives.

The CSC is in charge of clearing all third-party deals worth $600 or more.

It created uncertainty earlier this month when it announced, in essence, the collectives did not have a “valid business purpose” if their only reason to exist was ultimately to pay players. Lawyers for the players barked back and said that is what a collective was always met to be, and if it sells a product for a profit, it qualifies as legit.

The parties are working on a compromise, but if they don’t reach one they will take this in front of a judge to decide.

With Aug. 1 coming up fast, coaches are eager to lock in commitments they’ve spent months, sometimes years, locking down from high school recruits.

“Recruiting never shuts off, so we do need clarity as soon as we can,” Buckeyes athletic director Ross Bjork said. “The sooner we can have clarity, the better. I think the term ‘collective’ has obviously taken on a life of its own. But it’s really not what it’s called, it’s what they do.”

In anticipating the future, some schools have disbanded their collectives while others, such as Ohio State, have brought them in-house. It is all a bit of a gamble. If the agreement that comes out of these negotiations doesn’t restrict collectives, they could be viewed as an easy way to get around the salary cap. Either way, schools eyeing ways for players to earn money outside the cap amid reports big programs have football rosters worth more than $30 million in terms of overall player payments.

“It’s a lot to catch up, and there’s a lot for coaches and administrators to deal with,” Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said, noting the terms only went into play on July 1. “But I don’t think it’s unusual when you have something this different that there’s going to be some bumps in the road to get to the right place. I think everybody is committed to get there.”

Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, whose program tapped into the transfer portal and NIL to make the most remarkable turnaround in college football last season, acknowledged “the landscape is still changing, changing as we speak today.”

“You’ve got to be light on your feet and nimble,” he said. “At some point, hopefully down the road, this thing will settle down and we’ll have clear rules and regulations on how we operate.”

At stake at Oregon is what is widely regarded as a top-10 recruiting class for a team that finished first in the Big Ten and made the College Football Playoff last year along with three other teams from the league.

“It’s an interpretation that has to be figured out, and anytime there’s a new rule, it’s how does that rule adjust, how does it adapt, how does it change what we have to do here,” Lanning said. “But one thing we’ve been able to do here is — what we say we’ll do, we do.”

“There’s been tremendous highs. There have been difficult lows,” Brownell said, “but through all of it, there have been unbelievable life experiences and relationships with people that have meant a lot to me and still do. And I’d still like to keep going here.”

Brownell is clear-eyed about the challenges of continuing on.

Where a program like IU pays its basketball players handsomely, Clemson will earmark revenue-sharing dollars for athletes according to the money each sport brings in.

Football, which is responsible for 80-plus percent of the Tigers’ revenues, will have a sizable rev-share cap compared to its peers. Clemson basketball will inevitably have less than its competitors, including mid-majors that don’t have football programs to share with.

But also some more hoop-centric ACC schools.

“We’re all just trying to figure it out over the next couple years,” Brownell said, “and there’s gonna be some sacrifices that we’re all gonna have to make.”

Brownell figuring out how to manage revenue-sharing gap

While every coach wants as much support as possible, Brownell won’t complain about.

He gets why football is receiving an estimated $15 million of the $18 million available in direct revenue-sharing with athletes, which leaves about $2 million for basketball.

“I mean, there’s 58,000 football season ticket holders,” Brownell said, calling Clemson football a top 5 program nationally. “That’s a big part of the culture of this place, as it should be. Because of the success of the football program, a lot of us in other sports have benefited greatly.”

Clemson has to stay ahead in football.

Brownell, who has brought the Tigers to the NCAA tournament in back-to-back years, including an Elite Eight run in 2024, has to do the best he can with what he has.

College basketball and football are in a strange place right now with the massive changes being swept in by NIL, the transfer portal and now the House Settlement.

It’s going to take a while for things to settle down but Duke football coach Manny Diaz is optimistic that things will work out just fine for his program

On the Jim Rome show, Diaz said this:

“It benefits us. The new landscape, it helps Duke. Wherever the world was 20 years ago, it’s not the same now, everybody can agree on that. We know there’s the portal, hopefully it goes to one portal, but the portal is here to stay. And this is a school that’s going to remain transformational. What this education can do… they still understand that.

“I think we were one of the fewest portal exits teams in the country in terms of guys outgoing. And that’s because our players are here for more than just football.”

He also believes that Duke’s academic culture tends to limit transfers:

“This school with our requirements, it does that by proxy. It just happens whether you like it or not. So you get a lot of people that were really raised the same way, guess what happens when you put them in a locker room? They really enjoy playing with and for one another. So when that portal opens, they don’t want to leave their best friends.

“I’d like to take credit for it, it ain’t me. They want to play for the guys down there, and that’s because they’re about the same stuff.”

There are a lot of theories and possibilities that we have considered when it comes to this Strange New World of college sports, but it never occurred to us that Duke could be at an advantage. That’s really kind of amazing.

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Longhorns’ quarterback Arch Manning is the highest-paid NIL player in college football, according to On3.com.

Manning, who will become the starting quarterback later this year, has a total NIL valuation of $6.8 million, over $2 million more than Carson Beck, the University of Miami quarterback, who sits in second place.

NIL, or “Name, Image and Likeness,” allows student athletes to be paid for their personal brand through endorsements and other opportunities. Manning has notably endorsed Raising Cane’s, Uber, Vuori and Panini America, to name a few.

Manning, who can trace his football lineage to quarterback royalty through his uncles, NFL legends Peyton and Eli Manning, and his grandfather, Archie Manning, was also at the top of this list last year. But his new position as the starting QB, after last year’s starter Quinn Ewers left for the draft, has earned him an additional $3.7 million in NIL money.

The Longhorns open their season Aug. 30 against Ohio State. 

Now that we’re a quarter of a way through the century, there have been plenty of rankings to signify the best players, coaches and even moments that have occurred over the past 25 years.

The Athletic has compiled a top 25 ranking that is sure to spark some controversy, listing the top 25 college coaches of the 2000s.

Fans of the UNC basketball program will love to see where former head coach Roy Williams ranks, especially given who he is ranked ahead of!

Williams earned the No. 2 spot on the list, an impressive spot for the Hall of Fame coach. Don’t worry- the guy from Duke, Mike Krzyzewski, isn’t the lone coach ahead of him on the list.

Krzyzewski actually ranks No. 3 on the list, while Bill Self claimed the top spot.

While Duke fans will cry about their former leader not being ranked ahead of Williams, The Athletic had a clear-cut explanation for why the coach wearing Carolina Blue got the edge.

Roy Williams

Teams: Kansas (2000-03), North Carolina (2003-21)
National titles: 3
Final Fours: 7
Conference regular-season championships: 11
Conference tournament titles: 3
NCAA Tournament appearances: 19
Wins: 574 (27.3 per season)

Williams built a juggernaut at Kansas, and while he was a beast in the regular season in the 1990s at KU, he was finally starting to be equally as dominant in March in the early 2000s. Williams made back-to-back Final Fours in his final two seasons in Lawrence, then took a core that missed the NCAA Tournament in 2003 and won the national title in his second season at North Carolina. Williams is tied for the most titles this century and is a Kris Jenkins buzzer-beater away from four. Williams had a great eye for recruiting to his system and there were few things in basketball more aesthetically pleasing than the Carolina break. He just edges Coach K because he reached two more Final Fours and more than doubled him on conference titles this century.

Basically, Williams’ two more Final Four appearances and his conference titles (which he doubled Coach K in) proved to be the difference.

Of course, these types of rankings are always subject to debate. Heck, you could make the case that both Coach K and Williams could have a strong case to be the top spot (even though Self has had quite the career thus far).

However, we’ll take this small victory and run with it, as The Athletic got this particular ranking right (especially the order in which they chose to rank Williams and Krzyzewski.